Tell me again
by kimmiesjoy
Summary: Sudden cold around her calf muscles force her to step back into the spray of hot water. Drawn to the warmth as he invades the cubicle in silence.


Based on a song prompt from **AlwaysCastle**: Challenge 4. Song challenge. New rules. One song. One play all the way through. No arguments... first song ONLY! BE FAIR!

Disclaimer: I own nothing and no one.

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**Kate Havenvik - Grace**

The water cascades in soothing rhythm as it falls from above. Lifting her face she closes her eyes and runs her fingers slowly through her hair. Pulling it gently from her neck, she turns under the spray and tilts so the hot water can press against the bruises appearing in strange patterns over her body.

Her fingers slide over a mark at the edge of her collarbone and the wince of pain forces memories to the forefront of her mind. Memories she doesn't want and in the silence and white noise of the shower she seeks to distract herself.

Lifting her now saturated hair high on the top of her head she reaches for a bottle blindly. His shampoo turned over in her hands until she can lather her hair. The smell rich and deep filling the rising steam as it slides over her body.

It helps.

Her fingers pressing into her scalp as she waits for the feeling, the tender ache to fade into nothing. There are bruises in her hair. Bumps along the back of her skull from where she hit the floor.

Sudden cold around her calf muscles force her to step back into the spray of hot water. Drawn to the warmth as he invades the cubicle in silence. His hands slide across the bruises she avoids, lifting the straggles of hair from her neck as he helps her fingers to glide through the sodden mass.

He forces her hands away, takes their place in her hair before letting the bubble filled tendrils fall back over her shoulder. His hands run down her arms as he leans in inhaling under the continuous spray.

"Mine?" He questions softly as his hands roam over the bruises at her waist.

"Mmm." She agrees, still facing away but she can hear the confusion in his voice.

"Why?" His fingers lift again, soothing through the mass of bumps, she feels when he presses against them, three bumps in her hairline, before he lathers more of the shampoo.

"I like the smell." She says softly, turning in his arms but leaning away from him, into the cold tile of the shower.

"But, it doesn't smell like you." He states watching the way her eyes fall closed and the water catches on her eyelashes. Teardrops of moisture fall in rivers down her cheeks, but they aren't tears, why would she cry here with him?

"No." She agrees forcefully "No, it doesn't smell like me." And that's sort of the point isn't it. She's not really her, not herself anymore.

She lifts her hand up into the streaming waterfall of water letting it flood her skin, gather in her palm and gush its way over her shoulder.

His fingers reach out tentatively, pressing at the long and painful jagged line across her abdomen.

Blue and purple, green tinges around the edges of the bruise.

"Tell me again." He pleads softly and she can't help but sigh, because really, three times and he still needs to hear it again.

"I...just.." She lifts her head, eyes open again, fingers sliding around her body to where his hand rests at her stomach. She holds his wrist, lets his hand stay flat against her as she breathes into the space, into him.

"Does it bother you?" He asks, and she can see he's willing to pull back, he needs it, the response, but one word from her and he would step back.

The lie is on the tip of her tongue faster than it should be and she swallows before she bites it back.

No more lies, no more half truths.

If she can give him the honesty she has denied him so long, he will have it.

"It bothers me that it bothers you." She says, waiting for whatever his reaction will be.

"I'm sorry."

But she shakes her head her hand at his chest, rising higher, finding his face. The spray of the water hitting them both in the shoulder, sparking up over their faces and she soothes the trickles from his skin, watching as the steady flow just replaces them instantaneously.

"So ask me." She says softly again, voice barely a whisper above the fall of the water.

"I...don't have..."

"Yes you do." She sighs, knowing even as he tries to deny it and protect her by hurting himself...he needs this.

"You're sure?"

She nods. "Though maybe...this...you could try and make this..."

"The last time?" He looks down his hands at her waist, dragging them over her wet skin until they sit at her shoulders. He feels her nod and he has to close his eyes, pull back for a moment from the depth of her that he's falling into. He takes a deep slow breath, "I can't...promise that I won't need to ask again, Kate. I just..."

She smiles her finger falling over his lips, thumb soothing slowly until he stops the battle with words he doesn't really want to speak and just...breathes.

"Then ok." She says quietly, her voice strong but hidden away, buried under things neither of them have touched on yet. "Then you'll ask me and I will tell you..." Her thumb runs along his lip again as she watches his eyes, waiting, hoping. "And you'll try...and if its not enough and you need to ask again, you'll ask."

She shrugs like it's simple.

His fingers tighten over her shoulder "Yeah?"

"Yes." She squeezes back.

"And if after that..."

"However long it takes." She says watching as his breathing evens out again, her own matching pace. "So just...ask."

He nods, another breath, this one to ready himself for the onslaught.

He lets her step away, his hand over her stomach again moving to the mark that first drew his eye when he stepped into the shower with her. "This one."

Her hand slides away from his body falling to rest over his fingers. Their hands across her stomach in a far more intimate way than it should be given the circumstance.

"This," she says quickly, pressing his fingers into the mark as she speaks. "Is from where I rolled over the ledge."

He closes his eyes briefly nodding. "Ok."

She sighs because she knows it's not, nowhere near ok but maybe 4th time's the charm. Maybe 400 times will be the charm, she doesn't care, because with each retelling the pain in his eyes lessens just a little, just enough.

"Ok." He says his hand moving along her arm until it slides around her shoulder, grazes marring the joint.

They look like fingernail marks.

They're not.

"This one?" She asks and without waiting for confirmation as she settles her hand over his again, pressing them into her skin, letting him feel her alive beneath his fingertips. "This is from where he dragged me..."

"Over the roof." He finishes, interrupting. "And this is from..." his hand moves to her hip bone, the shadow of mottled skin running from the grooves of her pelvis down three quarters of her leg. Funnily patterned bruising in lines and angles that he still doesn't quite understand.

"Where I fell running up the stairs."

Shivers and goose bumps erupt everywhere as his hand moves again. Slowly up her leg, over the tender protrusions of her angular hips, past the line that covers her entire stomach.

He lingers gently at her shoulder, over grazes and scabs that have washed away in the heated water. Pink lines run down her arms and he soothes them with his fingers as best he can. But he knows the story of these marks, and he wants the words he hasn't heard yet.

His fingers slide into her hair, her head tilting to one side as she lets him find the bruises at the base of her skull. The rounded bumps he counts off with his finger tips, one, two, three.

Three pea sized lumps in her hairline that make her wince.

He hears the sound even as she tries to cover it and he presses his lips to her forehead in penance. "Sorry..."

She shakes her head. Why should he be sorry? He is the best tonic in the world. The best potion to take everything away and she could drown in him. She might in fact, as she raises herself up seeking his mouth.

But he pulls away his eyes tight and she surrenders, he still needs the story.

"These?" He asks, a little more force in his voice at this point every time she tells him. The first time all the responses were barked demands, the second they were grief filled and painful wanting to absolve her of responsibility.

She owns her mistakes though. The marks on her body the proof of her stupidity and she wears them with something close to pride. They will fade with time but they brought her to a good place, she looks into his eyes again, a wonderful place and she's thankful for that.

"From where he bashed my head into the ground." She sounds blunt, she means to. The first time she tried to hide the details, move slowly through the events, but it seemed to torture him.

His head drops forwards, fingers still at the nape of her neck until they are standing nose to nose under the fall of the water.

She breathes him in, and this is why she loves the smell of his shampoo, the smells that aren't her, but still familiar. She breathes it all in deeply and lets it cling to every cell as it snakes its way through her body.

His lips move against the bridge of her nose then, feather light kisses, she realises, across her skin as he heads for the next page of the story. The fingerprint marks that circle her throat like a macabre necklace.

But this is new.

His mouth finds each imprinted indentation and discolouration and surrounds it. He draws the meaning behind it out of her like poison with each kiss.

"This?" He asks against her ear when he deviates for a second, finding the time before he smoothes over one particularly nasty bruise with his warm wet tongue.

"He tried to strangle me." She says quietly, lost in the feelings, and the memories and no she won't break down because she doesn't need to.

"Tried." He states fiercely against her skin as his hands start to move again, gathering her slender fingers into his palms.

"Tried." She agrees and it's wrong, maybe, surely, that she wants to smile through something that shouldn't be amusing, shouldn't be uplifting or hopeful. But the phrase 'tried and failed, tried and failed' is just dancing around her head.

He pulls away from her then, and she rolls her neck feeling loose. Pulling her hand up between them he turns her wrist over in his large fingers, pressing at the bone, skirting the padded flesh that turns white under his firm grasp.

He smiles and that's new too.

"This one?" His thumbs moves from the pulse point of her left wrist , down her forearm, more fingerprints, more handprints.

She wants to laugh again, she's a walking finger painting.

"This one is Ryan." She says pointing at the most prominent of all her bruises, the ones that burn brightest against her skin. Ryan's determination to keep her alive is literally seared into her arm.

"And this one..." She crinkles her eyes, as she scrunches her nose, "is some guy from …" Then she does laugh and she looks up finding his eyes warm, warmer that she expects. "I really should know his name."

"Might help." He agrees, pulling the fingers wrapped in his up to his mouth, kissing over the ache that rests just below the surface.

"Hmmm?" She questions.

"I like this one." He says ignoring her, and circling the brightest of all her bruises. "This one kept you safe. This one brought you back."

She shakes her head, but she doesn't elaborate, he knows that story. His words that kept her safe, his belief that brought her back, but he knows it all. She has told that tale a thousand times in the touch of her fingers or the brush of her lips.

He knows that story back to front, but she'll keep telling it.

As long as he does.

"Tell me again." She pleads. And he smiles, dropping her hands and falling back into place at her hips. It's their pattern. They already have patterns, and she groans when he presses the entire solid length of his body against her and into the wall.

Slowly this time, no hard thud and screaming passion. He wraps himself around her tight and secure and warm as the water still falls.

"Tell me again." She asks softer still when she leans back and arches her neck, letting his lips slide over the skin that makes her tense at first in pain and then again in delicious agony.

It cuts like a knife, the heated blade shooting straight through to her stomach and she gasps as she presses into him.

"Tell me..." His mouth collides with hers. He draws across the open line of her lips  
with his tongue, swallowing down her need to be told and replacing it with his own urge to taste, to feel.

When he pulls back from her kiss he falls to the hollow of her neck, his lips moving rapidly across her cheek and down over her jaw as she tries to catch her breath. She feels his hand slide slowly up her back as she grips tight to his shoulder, her fingers sliding through his hair.

She loses herself, closing her eyes against the panting breath, the healing touch.

"Tell..." She tries again, but his mouth glides easily over hers, stealing the words. She can feel her lips move, smiling almost through the kiss, almost because he won't truly let her. He devotes every connection and collision to devastating her ability to think, to demand to plead.

She can't ask him to tell her but, opening her eyes slowly, she tells him, without words, without the need for anything other than the lift of her lashes and the blaze of her pupils.

Silently, she asks him to show her.


End file.
